When the Russian Minister of Defense, Anatoly Serdyukov, reported to the President on various achievements of his subordinates, he mentioned "several tests of the Yarts ballistic missile". The missile, of course, is the RS-24 MIRVed Topol-M, tested on May 29, 2007.
The actual name of the missile, however, is "Yars" (Ярс), not "Yarts" (Ярц). It's hard to tell whether it was Serdyukov or Kremlin transcribers who got the name of the missile wrong, but apparently nobody cared to check with the missile designers. Now it would be interesting to see if they could struggle their name back. And I'd be curious to know what they were thinking in the first place - the name has no particular meaning in Russian (although one could detect the old Slavic root "yar" there).
The book
Comments
Yaderno-Raketnaya Sistema?
No, the times of acronyms like that are long gone.
Where was it stated that the correct name is "Ярс" (Yars)? Also, is there any meaning for either variant?
Although there was one humoristic explanation for Ярц (Yarts) variant - both the first and the last letters don't appear in English (only as a combination). This will confuse the enemy! :-)